By Gerald Schwanke, M.Div, LMFT, PrairieCare Medical Group

This special guest blog post is brought to you as part of May is Mental Health Month.

I hesitated when I was asked to write a blog post about mental health awareness for church workers. First, some people are tired of hearing about mental health. Second, many people are discouraged about mental health techniques because they “just don’t work.” I get it. Getting mental health techniques to work is more about practicing them than just doing them once and “being fixed.”

So let’s start with this reminder: mental health awareness is not about “getting over something” or “getting fixed” or “moving on.” Mental health awareness is about daily practicing skills that support your emotions, relationships, body, and nervous system, including your brain. Trauma expert Janina Fisher teaches that when you apply mental health techniques, you must realize that any technique will only solve 10 percent of what you’re struggling with. Therefore, we must keep searching for solutions for the other 90 percent of the problem.

It is my hope that this blog has a little something in it for everyone—but especially for church workers—as you search for ways to support your emotions, relationships, body, and brain. Let us start by defining mental health.  

What is mental health?

There are many definitions of mental health. Whenever I have seen mental health defined, the definitions generally lead to talking about emotions such as sadness and fear; relationship stress such as marital or parenting issues; body symptoms like butterflies and upset stomach; the nervous system like tension or anxiety; and the brain like executive function or stress responses. When we are talking about mental health awareness, we are talking about being aware of all these various aspects of ourselves, others, and our relationships.

The second part of mental health awareness is that we have all been practicing some form of taking care of our mental health during our lifetimes. We have all developed ways to cope with stress, survive painful upbringings and / or events, navigate conflicted relationships, and manage those pesky butterflies. Congratulate yourself on the good work that you have done so far!

The dangers of cumulative stress.

Now, let us narrow into one aspect of mental health that affects many church workers: cumulative stress. What makes cumulative stress subtle and difficult to detect is that it accumulates undetected in tiny increments over time. Cumulative stress starts sticking to your emotional and physical memory banks with each conversation you have about wearing protective masks or not wearing masks? Do we open or do we remain closed? For the hundredth time, “How do I get the live stream to work?”

Cumulative stress sneaks up on church workers after a funeral, making hospital calls, visiting members after a tragic accident, and listening to and caring for members who are hurting. Cumulative stress creeps in while managing people and deadlines, helping struggling students during recess and after school, calling a parent or member who is upset with the way you are doing things at church or in the classroom, and worst of all seeing little to no results from your efforts. Combine these with tending to family illnesses, raising children, and completing daily household tasks, and you have a perfect recipe for cumulative stress.

Before you know it, you feel numb, snap at your spouse or children for no reason, and sit quietly in the dark. You have trouble getting and staying asleep, you experience intestinal problems, and you are constantly waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. You learn to cope with cumulative stress by conditioned, habitual, automatic responses like “just plowing ahead,” “nose to the grindstone,” or “sucking it up.”

Practical tips.

While no one is immune to the sneaky character of cumulative stress, the following tips may help slow down your automatic, conditioned, habitual responses so you can make a more conscious and purposeful response.

Embrace your inadequacy.

Hearing that we are all susceptible to cumulative stress is not easy. So embrace your humanness and inadequacy. Rebecca Manley Pippert in Stay Salt, her book on evangelism, talks about our smallness and inadequacy. She presents the idea of inadequacy from the point of view that God has created us to be totally dependent on Him for everything. I encourage all church workers to read The Care of Souls: Cultivating A Pastor’s Heart by Harold Senkbeil, especially pages 26-29 for guidance on being okay with our inadequacy.

Dependency is not easy for church workers. Somewhere in our lives, we learned that being a good teacher, administrator, or pastor meant you had to know it all, do it all, and be it all. Embracing your humanness and inadequacy will help you take care of yourself with kindness, compassion, and grace. Psalm 25 is a good place to start as David tells us that God first teaches us in our sinfulness and inadequacies and then how He comes to us in His unmovable love.

Taking care of ourselves is going to be tough. We all have defenses that pop up and interfere with loving and being kind to ourselves. The best way to begin to overcome those defenses is to be curious and explore your thoughts, or the tension in your stomach, or the negative emotion surrounding being kind to yourself. See if you can share those newly discovered negative responses or thoughts with a spouse, friend, or professional to reduce the defense and open yourself up to the Spirit’s work of God’s grace and kindness that is already at work within you.

Sleep more.

Sleep is vital to limiting the negative impacts of cumulative stress. Sleep helps our body and mind repair from the day’s stress. Yet for many people, sleep is elusive. Here are some hints:

• Ask your spouse or children if you snore. If the answer is yes, complete a sleep study or get a snore guard to help you breathe while you sleep.

• Implement a sleep routine where you complete the same activities before bed every night. This includes limiting all screen time one hour before bed.

• Use a fan or noise machine. These can help light sleepers because they provide a calming atmosphere that reduces sudden noises that may wake you.

• Check with your physician for sleep aid medication and supplements.

• Use your awake time wisely. If you have difficulties getting or staying asleep, becoming angry or discouraged just adds to your inability to sleep. Since you are awake, do some activity that does not cause you to wake further: pray in bed, slowly meditate and repeat a Bible verse, or softly sing a hymn.

Focus on food.

Cumulative stress tends to limit or increase a person’s diet. Explore various meal plans that fit your diet and busy life schedule.

Food sensitivities or allergies can also place additional stress on your body and mind, adding intestinal pain, depressed mood, and joint pain. There are many clinics that can help you analyze your diet or take a blood sample to determine what foods are difficult for you to digest when stressed and what foods you are allergic or sensitive to. They can then help you eliminate these foods that are causing your brain and body added stress. No, it is not pleasant limiting the foods you love, but it just might make you feel better and give you an edge in coping with cumulative stress. Such a clinic is Neighborhood Naturopathic in Edina.

Expel the stress.

Discharging stress from the body is imperative for lowering the symptoms of cumulative stress. Cumulative stress is unused energy that is stored in your muscles and nervous system. Activities like walking, running, weightlifting, yoga, martial arts, or just plain stretching help you use up this leftover energy in a positive way.

Another way to expel stress is through social engagement, which is so crucial as God has created us to be social beings (Genesis 1 and 2). As the pandemic restrictions decrease, start slowly reconnecting with people. Move at a pace that is comfortable for you. When those butterflies tell you that a particular event is too risky, back off and try another situation where the butterflies are less active.

Breath work is one of the best ways I know how to slow down those butterflies and reset the body during or after a stressful moment, encounter, or activity. The reason for its effectiveness is that stress moves us inward to protect us. This inward movement changes our breathing patterns to respond to the threatening stress. Everyone has their own breathing rhythm, so practice different levels and pacing of deep inhalation and exhalation until you find a pace that is comforting for you. Personally, I like Wim Hof Breathing.

Going on vacation can also help you expel cumulative stress, but planning and executing a vacation can be stressful in and of itself. So, in between your vacations, get away for shorter weekend trips, stop by a pond to look at the geese on your way home from a visit, volunteer to run an errand to get away from a stressful environment, go to a local library for some solitude, or pray silently while you get your oil changed at your local mechanic.

Finding satisfaction in some form of accomplishment is also a way to be refreshed in a calling—like church work—where accomplishments are hard to see. Mow the lawn, straighten out some chairs, or pull some weeds in your garden or from the sidewalk cracks at church. Small accomplishments can help shift feelings of despair.

Meditate on God’s Word.

Finally, meditating on God’s Word is priceless. No, it may not stop the accumulation of stress in your life. Cumulative stress is the nature of the business that you are in. However, reading God’s Word out loud, writing it out, and drawing an image of a passage are ways to slow you down and engage the body and mind to take in God’s healing Word. We must connect to our God who is always with us through our daily stressors.

Our faith and trust in our gracious Lord may suffer under the weight of cumulative stress. Yet we continue to grow in understanding and believing what God’s grace is in His calling us as inadequate, sinful people to lead and guide His sheep homeward.

The above suggestions are just that, suggestions. They are not a magic cure. As you finish reading this blog post, you may feel no different that when you started. That is okay. However, see if you can take just one idea to use as one small step toward improving your mental health—emotional, relational, physical, intellectual, and spiritual.

Gerald Schwanke is the preaching assistant at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Watertown and a Licensed and Marriage and Family Therapist. He is a Level II trained therapist in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Emotion Focus Therapy. He is currently practicing at PrairieCare in Chaska, Minnesota, working collaboratively with people to heal from abuse, trauma, depression, anxiety, attachment, and marital and family relationship struggles. You may contact him at 952-903-1383 or at gschwanke@prairie-care.com.